From the beginning of her career Lisa Corinne Davis has probed the complexities
of race, culture, and history in mixed media works that might best be described
as visual reflections. Existing somewhere between collage, painting and
drawing, the works provide a metaphorical reservoir in which form and content
merge and meaning seems embedded in the materials themselves. At issue are
the assumptions we make on the basis of ethnicity and race and the difficulty
of seeing the individual apart from the group. Davis' work provides an inquiry
into the nature of how others know us.

Beginning with the self-portraits of the Heritage series (1986-94)
that explore a personal identity, Davis' work has evolved from the autobiographical
to an examination of the individual in the context of collective society.
In the Heritage series Davis' features are layered with objects and with
images, primarily of women, signifying a distinct cultureAlice in
Wonderland, African sculpture, Renaissance paintings. These provide cultural
icons and literary and art historical personae, to be referenced and explored
in relation to the self. Their open-ended presentation encourages the
viewer to work out the relationship between the two. Graphite veils the
ink portraits. Found materials, such as bones, black-eyed peas and hair,
reinforce the visual imagery and convey a metaphoric content. In this
series materials and imagery are constructed layer upon layer, like archeological
strata, through which the viewer delves. It is a methodology that continues
to evolve in Davis' work. In an artist statement from this period in which
Davis describes herself as an African-American woman of mixed heritage,
she questions the "labels and fictions" that posit "the
notion of cultural purity" as an "artificial simplicity."
Given the geographic mobility of contemporary society and, for that matter,
the migrations that have always been a part of human history, it is hard
to argue that culture and race are fixed entities. In the Heritage works,
Davis asserts the primacy of the individual and explores identity as an
intricate fusion of cultural, historical, and biographical circumstances.

Essential Traits #7, detail

Essential Traits #10, 1997, detail

Moving from the autobiographical to a consideration of the broader issues
of stereotyping and labeling with Essential Traits (1995-1998),
Davis began to develop a new visual vocabulary of symbols and structure.
In this series an underlying grid provides the organizational principle
for work, which is an increasingly complex weave of ideas, materials,
and imagery. Collage is the basic technique, and paper is the primary
materialincluding the pages of books, maps, tracing paper, hand-made
Abacca paper, papier maché, Xerox paper, and vellum. In Essential
Traits No. 7, Davis uses the pages of an old American history text,
placed end to end in a vertical scroll-like format. The pages are stained
with ink and mounted on canvas. In this work Davis edits both text and
image. With black ink and white colored pencil, she adds portraits of
those omitted from history and scratches out and replaces passages of
this outdated Eurocentric text that once provided a historical canon.
The subtle and understated visual form of this work tempers a more radical
intent.

Portraits of individual people, which Davis finds in an array of newspapers
including the foreign press, are built up to create a mass in which both the
group and the individual are visible (as in Essential Traits #8). In some
works these photo-based images are traced and translated into line drawings
conveying a distinct individual; in others they become cutout as a silhouette,
a negative space, an anonymous every man or empty vessel on which to project
ideas about the group. They are uniformcut from templatesdemocratized
and made equal. The stories of their daily lives surround them on the pages
of newspapers.

Essential Traits #11, 1997, detail

Materials are mined for their suggestive referencesvellum becomes a
metaphor for skin, papier maché pulp made from foreign language newspapers
alludes to ethnic diversity, and collaged maps refer to the origins and migrations
of people throughout the world. Davis' palette, mostly warm earth tonesterracottas,
ochres, and umbersevoke variations of skin color. As physical objects,
these large, mixed media works often hang like tapestries with rich textural
surfaces. The translucence of the vellum, tracing paper and acrylic washes,
as well as the penetrated, negative spaces, invite the viewer to dig through
the layers to content below.

In more recent works, the Indirection and Index series, Davis further codifies
the structure of information, pushing the work to greater abstraction
both of imagery and of ideas. She works with the logic of a poet rather
than demographer, setting up categories, collecting data, coding information,
and creating pseudo graphs and charts in a highly personal idiom. Maps
are sometimes overlaid with topographical indications or radiating latitude
and longitude lines that also read as targets. Lines plot the course of
rivers, railroad tracks, and roads. Parts of the world are juxtaposed
incongruously, suggesting a psychological affinity rather than a literal
position. Bright fluorescent colors, used along with more naturalistic
skin tones, still reference "skin" by making it clear that it
is an arbitrary system from which one draws no real information about
the individual. Sections of the work are organized by color and seem to
track the groups. Works, such as Index #5, which rely in large
part on paint, seem to derive much of their structure and design from
collage technique.

Index #7, 2001, detail

Davis focuses in many of the works on those aspects of the individual
that might identify the person as part of a groupskin color, language,
and geographic origin. In Index #4, she uses fingerprints, a highly
individual physical characteristic, yet one that is impossible to reduce
to those categories. In this work, thousands of fingerprints transferred
onto small, painted pieces of vellum are pieced together like a quilt.
Sections are bracketed in bright fluorescent colors suggesting groupings
that alternately read as graphs. In another work, David, Jonathan, Sally,
Reiner..., a large-scale installation, hundreds of noses cast from
friends are scattered across the gallery wall. Made of handmade paper,
the noses are shaped by draping the wet paper over the plastic mold created
from the cast. Along the sides, surnames refer to the subject, and lines
connect to corresponding noses. In this work the noses, while demonstrating
subtle variations, are difficult to identify. In fact it is the names
that suggest the most about the individual. In Index #6, pages
of novels in foreign languagesFrench, Polish, Vietnamese, Chinese,
and Thai among themare painted in beige, pinks, magenta, yellows,
and browns. Each page has a cut silhouette, suggesting a personal narrative
and an individual life. The pages overlap, altering and creating a mix
of colors within the outline of the silhouettes. It is an overall pattern
in which the individuals, inseparable from the group, are woven into an
interconnecting fabric.

This exhibition provides a look at the evolution of the work of Lisa
Corinne Davis over the course of sixteen years and through the four major
series. It is a window onto the career of an important artist as it unfolds.

Susan Hoeltzel

Lisa Corinne Davis: Index

Our early 21st century moment seems a time when the question of creative
originality exemplifies, either pessimistically a hopeless dead-end or,
optimistically the perfect peak of the mountain in a Sisyphean tale. The
latter marks a place in creativity as part of an artistic cycle, an ad infinitum
game, where creative advancements always eventually lead to a space pregnant
with new opportunity. While computer technology churns out new goods on
a daily basis to feed the corporate appetite for fresh consumers on a global
scale, contemporary art has adorned itself in the cloak of repetition. And
this is not necessarily a bad thing. Existential faith in the individual
impulse still represents fertile space for the freshest and the newest in
originality, in the literal sense, as in never been seen, never been heard,
and never been felt, until that moment.

In the recent paintings of Lisa Corinne Davis you get the sense that
she is working with a very personal vocabulary to make sense of an impersonal
though historic present in painting, rooted in repetition. In painting,
the deployment of the grid is one of the most basic and simultaneously significant
attributes of twentieth century modernism. The grid, open yet closed, structured
but free, formulaic though often unscientific, and divisional though unifying,
is representative of a blank slate, possessing "several structural
properties which make it

Index #5, 2001

inherently susceptible to vanguard
appropriation," as Rosalind Krauss noted in the early 1980s. Davis
believes in the grid, has faith in the grid. Her paintings are about meaning,
more than the gestural figure ground relationships of much earlier examples,
for instance Robert Ryman or Agnes Martin. It is a process of abstraction
in which the artist is perpetually defining herself through a specific vocabulary
of forms that have found a home in the space of the grid. Though formally
refined and well constructed (her paintings look built to last), her attitude
to abstract painting and refinement is not merely formal. It is expressive,
that is to say that, she is giving you something to think about, to feel,
to ascertain with all your perceptive capabilities. While she laboriously
layers the surface of her paintings with information in the form of maps,
book pages in various languages, and unidentifiable silhouettes, this found
material is often obscured in the finishing. Yet, the trace remains.

Davis' most recent series of paintings, Index, take these elements
of a personal index as structural referents. They define the painting
as do the precise lines going vertically and horizontally across the surface
of the canvas. There is also a cultural trace in the form of the found
texts and maps, and in the diversity of the silhouettes of various people
though they remain only as great as the sum of their parts. Randomly placed,
these bits of information offer little in the way of allegory but the
dense, all-over field, in turn, exerts a pronounced emphasis on the minutiae
of individual differences. Her palette, though constantly being refined,
over the past few years, is marked by the accumulation of Fall colors
(yellow oxide, burnt sienna, and orange). The systemic and heavy layering
of tracing paper, found paper, drawing and paint is never taken to the
purity of total abstraction leaving them to evoke abstract imagery as
a referential aspect of daily life. And although a system is being deployed,
from a distance there is the warmth of her chosen colors and the sense
of a decisively beautiful painting.

Through the process of working with a repetitive central form, Davis
is confronting the dilemma of much recent abstraction by taking her own
path, avoiding the burden of modernist purity and the equally limiting postmodern
tropes of content specificity to make highly original paintings.